While you are busy calculating and assigning the sales target for your team, it is always helpful to go back and analyze what brought more deals to a closure. As you ponder over it, you may come across a lot of questions.

What is the average time taken for leads to complete the sales cycle? In a month, how many leads are being converted to customers? Who are the Star Performers in your sales team? What are the regions that generate more business?

It is possible that you are not quite sure of the answers to these questions that you ask yourself on a regular basis… Accurate numbers are required. So what do you do now? Of course! You pull a variety of reports with the required filters to get the information that you need. But do these reports provide insights to effectively manage your sales process and sales team!

Let me help you out at this point…

We can distinguish three main categories of reports in Zoho CRM that will provide value to your business. They can help you identify the metrics that drive more sales so that you can spend your time and effort in the right place.

Time Based Reports

Hundreds and thousands of leads do not guarantee increased sales. The secret of successfully converting qualified leads into sales lies in lead nurturing. And lead nurturing is effective only with a thorough understanding of the lead nurture process.

Do you have stagnant leads in your sales pipeline? How do you identify such leads and the extra time and effort taken for a successful conversion?
Well, with the right report, you can.

Time is money – goes an old saying and it’s hard to argue! Every minute, hour, day and year counts when you face the customer or a prospect. In the process of converting a lead to opportunity, timing is everything so how much is your time worth!

Reports in Zoho CRM can help you with the proper analysis of the lead nurturing cycle. Take a look at some of these reports to calculate your valuable time and its effectiveness.

Sales Cycle Duration across Lead Sources/Potential Type

Overall Sales Duration across Lead Sources/Potential Type

Lead Conversion across Industries/Owners

People Based Reports

Measuring the performance of your sales rep is crucial for your business. The sales metric used to measure the performance and effectiveness of sales rep vary. But knowing the right sales metric and getting the relevant information will help in identifying the strengths and weaknesses in your sales process – which sales rep is doing a great job and who needs to do better and requires a little coaching.

Reports that give an insight on the target achieved by an individual and the activities performed to achieve the target, is important while calculating the monthly sales target. You may try these performance-based reports in Zoho CRM that serves to measure the progress of individuals in your team. More importantly, to check the overall quality of the service you provide to the customers:

Sales Person’s Performance Report

Sales Cycle Duration across Owner

Lead Conversion Count across Owners

Revenue Based Reports

How much revenue is your business making? How much does each region or line of product contribute to the overall profit? Your sales may be great in one region but not in the other!

Knowing everything about the monthly revenue, the lead source that gives you more business, percentage of target achieved, etc. is important. Figuring out who your most profitable customers are can be difficult unless you have a detailed report of everything a customer buys and their purchase life cycle.

Measuring your organization’s revenue and growth need not be very difficult with the right report in Zoho CRM.

Sales by Lead Source

Pipeline by Probability/Stage

This Month Sales

A simple handy report can answer your questions and help your sales team decide which leads or customers they should follow-up with. Understand CRM reports and identify important sales metrics in your business with the help of these reports. If you need any help in generating reports, feel free to write to us.

Do tell us what are the most important sales reports that provide value to your business?

Kai Snyders 3 years ago

I want to know how I can create more categories./descriptions for my inventory or ITEMS, as it is listed on Zoho. We have a product range with many categories and I can only create 1 category on Zoho with a description. Please advise.

Pavitra 3 years ago

Hi Kai! Do you want to add more Product Categories for your products? If so, you can go to Setup > Customization > Fields and in the Products module add more values for the pick list field. That will be reflected in the report based on product category.

Pavitra 3 years ago

Manuel Pesqueira T. 3 years ago

Hi, I am trying to create a report using related modules but the fields from the related modules appear blank in the report. The fields I need are custom fields in the related modules, not standard fields, but I dont see anything that says custom fields may not be pulled to a report. Can anyone help?Manuel Pesqueira

Pavitra 3 years ago

Hi Jeremie! Did you try the ‘Columns to Total’ option while customizing the report? There, you can select the Potential Amount for which you can get the sum or total average in the report.Regards,Pavitra J

jeremieP 3 years ago

Thank you. I had tried this option (which I can only group by month in matrix report. Summary only provides me grouping by date, not by month.)The issue that I am having is that when group by month in matrix report, I can only see how many are closed per month, not the amount.Which should be the best route to go?THX

Wendy Wright 3 years ago

Pavitra 3 years ago

Kiran Reddy – ‘Overall Sales Duration’ is the average number of days taken for the Leads to be converted to Potential and then to be won. ‘Sales Cycle Duration’ is the average number of days taken for the Potential to be won. In these reports, the starting and ending dates are based on the time period that you define.’Potential Modified Time’ refers to the date and time when the record details (fields) are modified. Whereas, the ‘Potential Last Activity Time’ refers to the date and time when the last activity was performed which included adding a task or event, sending an email, adding notes closing a task etc. For more details on the activities, please refer to this link: https://www.zoho.com/crm/help/…

Kiran Reddy 3 years ago

@PavitraJ:disqus – What is the difference between ‘Sales Cycle Duration’ and ‘Overall Sales Duration’ in Potentials report? Is this in days or Hrs? What are the starting and the ending dates that are considered for calculating the same? Also, what is the difference between ‘Potential Modified Time’ and ‘Potential Last Activity Time’?

Dragan 3 years ago

As lead generation and lead nurturing became the most expensive part of selling process I really miss this part to be covered inside ZCRM.There is really revenue connection between number of calls (per sales rep) and closed deals.Specifically – I could use:. Lead status field inside call pop-up window. CALL BACK standard field just with date (and not date and time field). Progress measurement:.. how many suspect was called per week, per rep. and.. % change comparison… or this could/should be covered in campaign tab.

Pavitra 3 years ago

@Wendy, We do have reports where you can visualize the different stages of opportunities in percentage. These reports have the option to create pie charts that will give you the percentage calculation. For example, you can customize reports like ‘Pipeline by Stage’, ‘Leads by Stage’ and ‘Sales by Lead Source’. I would also suggest you to try the Advanced CRM Analytics powered by Zoho Reports for extended report options. Here is a link for more information: https://www.zoho.com/crm/integration/advanced-crm-analytics.html